Diffusion and Island formation on the ice Ih basal plane surface

We present theoretical calculations of the adsorption, diffusion and island formation of water admolecules on the basal plane surface of an ice Ih crystal. These are preliminary calculations based on the simple TIP4P interaction potential, a pairwise additive potential function based on point charges. At low coverage, we find that an admolecule prefers to sit at non-crystallographic sites on the surface (i.e., sites that do not fit into the ice lattice). Since ice Ih is proton disordered, no two sites are exactly the same and there is a wide range of binding energies. For some local environments the binding energy is of the order of, or even larger than, the cohesive energy. The proton disorder also results in a range of activation energies for diffusion. After mapping out a large number of diffusion barriers using the nudged elastic band method, a kinetic Monte-Carlo calculation of the diffusion at 140 K was performed. At early time, the mean squared displacement has anomalous scaling with time as is common for diffusion on random lattices. But, at longer time the scaling is normal and a diffusion coefficient can be obtained. The diffusivity is slightly larger than a recent experimental upper bound given by Brown and George. The energetics and dynamics of the formation of small islands on the ice surface have also been studied. It is found that islands up to and including pentamer are non-crystallographic, but the hexamer is crystallographic. While the formation of a crystallographic hexamer from a non-crystallographic pentamer and a new admolecule involves a complex concerted motion of all the island molecules and a large relaxation of the substrate, the activation energy for the process is estimated to be quite small, smaller than the admolecule diffusion barrier.